Wildest Dreams (The Contemporary Collection) (13 page)

“I just like details, and you never know when they might come in handy.” She answered easily, since it was a question she had already heard a few times from the people on her tour.

“While I’m at it, it’s also been puzzling me why you’re traveling alone. There must be a man in your life who could have come with you.”

She flipped the pages of the guidebook, giving it her attention as she answered, “Not really.”

“No?”

“No.”

He was silent a moment, as if analyzing the timbre of her voice. Finally he said, “You have something against men?”

“Why would you think that?” she asked, surprise standing in her eyes as she looked up.

“Most women your age, especially women who look like you do, are married.”

“I was engaged,” she said lightly. “It didn’t work out.”

“The guy was a jerk, right? And you wasted so much time with him, and were so wrong about what he was like, that you don’t trust your judgment anymore.”

She considered it for a moment. “I don’t know about that.”

“It’s the only thing that makes sense.”

Annoyance crept into her tone. “He might have died in an accident or turned out to be gay.”

“But he didn’t, did he? What happened?”

“We dated for six years, and were engaged nearly that long. He thought we should save for our future, you understand. Then he decided he would rather have a new convertible.”

“Just like that?” Rone asked, frowning.

“Not quite, but close.”

The description Rone applied to the man who had been her fiancé was short and profane.

“Exactly,” she agreed.

“But just because he was a jerk doesn’t mean all men are like that.”

“I know that, thanks.” The words were dry.

“But it doesn’t help? Care to hear my sad tale?”

She gave a small shrug, her mind busy with trying to decide why she had spoken about Charles. As a rule, she never mentioned him.

Rone sat up and reached for the wine bottle. Dividing what was left in it between their two glasses, he handed Joletta hers and took a sip from his own. “My wife,” he said evenly, “didn’t stay around a full three years, much less six. She fell in love with her scuba instructor on a trip to Bora-Bora, and got involved with whale songs and Greenpeace and the fate of the oceans. She told me I was boring and my life was decadent before she went off to live with her beachboy in a grass shack on stilts.”

“You made that up,” Joletta accused him as she watched his face for the beginnings of a smile.

“I didn’t. Word of honor.” He held up a hand in a Boy Scout’s salute.

“I don’t believe it.”

“She sent me a picture of the shack. There was a monster crab the size of a small dog that lived under the back steps, and they could swim off their front porch or catch aquarium fish from it for breakfast.”

Joletta looked at the wine in her glass. “You don’t sound as if you mind.”

“I was a little hot for a while, but it passed. We both knew it wasn’t working. If two people aren’t right together, it’s better to find it out after three years instead of thirty.”

“I suppose,” she said slowly.

“Tell the truth, do you miss the guy you were going to marry?”

“Not really, not anymore.” She drank the last of her wine.

“Yes, and the sex couldn’t have been that great, either. He sounds too self-centered.”

She gave him a look from the corners of her eyes, but made no answer. He was more right than he knew.

“So forget him. He can only matter as much as you let him.”

“I’ll do my best not to go into a decline,” she answered in dry tones.

They were still while the grass around them blew in the wind and the spring sunshine grew warm on their faces. Joletta let her mind wander, thinking of old relationships, not necessarily her own. And about cravat pins that modern men never wore. It was some time before she spoke again.

“Rone?”

His response was a few seconds in coming, as if he had to rouse himself from his own long thoughts to make it.

She frowned a little before she went on. “Do you know anything about the Foreign Legion?”

“The what?”

“The French Foreign Legion. You know.”

“
Beau Geste,
holding the desert fort to the last man, all that Hollywood stuff?”

“I was wondering when it was established.”

“The middle of the last century at least, I’d say, going by the movies. What year, I couldn’t begin to guess.”

A slow nod was her only answer as she narrowed her eyes in concentration. Rone set aside his empty wineglass. “Want me to find out for you?” he asked after a moment.

“No, no,” she said with a quick smile, “it isn’t that important. I was just — thinking about something I read — and about a ring I saw once in an antique shop, one with an insignia that I was told was a symbol of the Legion. The design was a phoenix, the bird that rises from its own ashes. But I can’t quite remember if there was anything else around it, a coronet of leaves, for instance.”

“You mean laurel leaves, like the old Roman victors?”

“I suppose,” she agreed.

“I see the phoenix, for the renewed lives of so-called lost men. But I don’t know about the rest.”

“Never mind; it doesn’t matter.”

He sat looking at her with a suspended, almost bemused look in his eyes. She could follow his gaze as it touched her hair, the shape of her mouth, the curves of her body as she relaxed beside him, then returned to rest once more on her lips. Tension crept in upon them, holding them still. Joletta had the feeling that if she breathed too deeply, if she twitched a muscle or inclined her body even a fraction of an inch toward Rone, she would be in his arms.

The trouble was that she could not be sure whether the impulse was his or her own. Or whether she was wary of it or wanted it.

One of the sheep lifted its head and bleated.

A faint shiver ran over Joletta. She felt her heart give a small throb as she looked away. After a moment she glanced at her watch.

Rone drew back as he followed her gesture. “Yes, I know, time to play tourist again.”

“Afraid so,” she said, her voice subdued.

Joletta had thought that Rone might offer to drive her back to London, and she searched her mind for an excuse to refuse. She didn’t need one after all. He returned her to the square where the tour bus was parked moments before the buses began to reload. His manner distracted, he said something about looking for a place to make a phone call, told her he would see her the next day, then turned and walked away.

Joletta was relieved, but she was also irritated. Shaking her head at her own lack of logic, she settled back for the bus ride. She meant to catch up on her notes, but spent most of the time staring out the window, watching as the bright yellow fields of blooming rape and squares of new-plowed ground, the hedgerows and manor houses of England, glided past.

It was later, while she was dressing to go out on a pub-crawling tour, that the phone rang.

“This is your twenty-four-hour information service,” Rone said, his voice deep and shaded with humor as it came over the line. “I thought you might want to know that the French Foreign Legion was founded by King Louis-Philippe in 1831. Recruits, all foreign volunteers, sign up for five years; when they complete their hitch, they become French citizens. Names and pasts are forgotten, kept entirely secret. It was, and still is today, a mercenary force which swears allegiance, not to France, but to the Legion. Anything else you want to know?”

“The ring design?”

“Only a phoenix. No crown. Happy now?”

“Ecstatic.”

“I’ll be around early tomorrow. For my reward.”

He hung up before she could answer.

Joletta overslept the next morning. It wasn’t just because of the late hour she had returned to the hotel or the various kinds of ale she sampled at the different pubs, nor was it the walk around London’s West End in the wake of their cheery, red-nosed Dickensian guide. She had lain awake for a long time after her return, thinking about Rone and the coincidence of his being on the same plane arriving in London, and also his persistence in seeking her out.

Such things did happen, of course, chance meetings, powerful attractions. Still, it bothered her. Her vanity was fairly healthy, but she found it hard to believe someone like Rone was so enamored of her that he would follow her around on the kind of touristy outings she was enjoying.

She need not have wasted her energy. When she hurried downstairs, breakfastless, he hadn’t arrived. She kept watch for him until the bus for Westminster Abbey was ready to roll out of the hotel parking lot. When there was still no sign of him, she shook her head with a slightly crooked smile and went on as planned.

She missed him, missed having someone to exchange quips and irreverent comments with, someone to exclaim to or to soothe her complaints. In the afternoon, as she explored the terra-cotta splendor of Harrod’s on her own, she discovered that wandering through the various courts with their molded ceilings and marbled splendor was not the same without him. Tea in the Terrace Room on the emporium’s fourth floor was a fine way to satisfy the cravings caused by staring at the candy and cakes and cheese and bread below, but would have been better if Rone had been there to show her how to pour the Betjeman & Barton mango tea without knocking the silver strainer off the top of the small silver pot. And deciphering the mysteries of the London bus system on the way back to the hotel was a chore instead of an adventure.

He was also absent the following day.

Joletta was determined not to think about him; still, she would have liked very much to have someone to share her pleasure in the gardens and to listen while she moaned about how short her time was compared with the weeks Violet had spent wandering in them. She needed another person to help her rhapsodize over the massed plantings of rhododendrons and azaleas and the huge lilac shrubs in full bloom, and to understand why she stood bemused before great beds of vivid, windblown pansies.

She wanted to tell Rone about the journal.

It had been on the tip of her tongue that afternoon in Bath to explain to him about Allain and the phoenix ring, but some remnant of discretion had held her back. The impulse was crazy, she knew, and yet she thought he would understand and maybe even be able to help her search out its secrets. It would, at the very least, have been nice to have his unbiased opinion.

She wondered what he would think about the language of the flowers that Allain had used to such romantic effect. Would he consider it a gesture of charm and grace, or only corny sentimentality?

It was sentimental; she had to admit it. But what was wrong with that? It seemed that the Victorians of Violet’s era, with their unabashed reveling in the heights and depths of their emotions, were less restricted, in their own way, than people were today. No one had time, now, for sweet and delicate indications of growing affection or for gentle enticements; no one risked their lives for love, or pined away for lack of it. Sentimentality had become an embarrassment. It was mushy and lacking in sophistication. It had been repressed, much as the Victorians had repressed sexuality. The situation was exactly reversed these days, so that love was now expressed as sexual attraction, with heavy breathing and the quick grab. It was depressing.

In a strange sort of way, Joletta envied Violet. Her ancestress had come to Europe in search of distraction and fecundity, and had found a romantic adventure. It hadn’t been that way for Violet’s descendant and her chance-met stranger. Joletta didn’t know why; maybe it was her own fault. Maybe she should have been more open, more forthcoming. Maybe she should have grabbed.

It didn’t matter, not really. She wasn’t going into a decline for lack of love. In fact, she didn’t need the complication of a man tagging along behind her when she crossed the channel to France the next day. She was just as well off without Rone.

As she strolled along the paths of Regent’s Park, Joletta found herself turning often to look behind her, or else searching the faces of the people nearby. At first she thought she was, almost unconsciously, expecting Rone to appear. After a while she began to feel on edge, not quite at ease. There was a prickling awareness in the surface of her skin, as if she were making herself conspicuous, or else was being watched.

Her pleasure in the gardens evaporated. She put away her notebook where she had been scribbling descriptions of the running roses, clematis, wisteria, and other old-fashioned flowers that Violet had mentioned. She took a few more pictures of annuals in massed beds, but her heart wasn’t in it. When a large group of schoolchildren came along, all in uniforms, she followed close behind them until she reached the gate. She headed then for the underground that would take her back to the hotel.

There was a note waiting for her at the desk. It was from Rone. She read it quickly in the elevator, then again more carefully once she had reached her room.

There was certainly nothing sentimental or romantic about it; it was, instead, brisk, slightly humorous, and matter-of-fact. He apologized for not appearing as threatened, but a business problem had come up, one that still required his attention. He had tried to call several times, but she was always out. He was keeping his fingers crossed for a smooth channel crossing for her, and he would catch up with her in Paris.